Laundry in Mumbai, India
I recently spent two weeks in India. India is a land of extreme contrasts. As extreme as any of the examples is the Dharavi slum which sits within spitting distance of world-class architecture. As a business man marveling at Incredible India while sitting in an executive lounge, riding in the back seat of a car with a driver whisking me to appointments, eating at tables set aside for dignitaries and even overseen by random strangers while touring the slum it is hard to understand India. Being a visitor with handlers providing orthodox interpretations of the sights and sounds reinforces the fishbowl mentality and reduces the chances of deep understanding.
Software developers and other IT specialties can trap themselves into a fishbowl by latching onto a single set of ideas and then reinforcing those ideas by allowing gatekeepers of orthodoxy to constrain how they interpret what they read and hear. There are times within the IT community that ideas take on a life of their own. For example, the 1990’s marked the high water mark for CMMI and the concepts that revolved around the model. Adherents of the CMMI model became almost religious in their zeal to protect their boundaries, like the adherents of Object Orientation and Case. Each new community created its own fishbowl to supplant the last. The fishbowl ensured that the next new “thing” went unnoticed by those in the fishbowl.
Many Agile adherents have begun to build fishbowls of rules around frameworks, like Scrum or Kanban, suggesting that only a single orthodoxy exists. They are abandoning the culture of improvement and experimentation that spawned the Agile movement. To be truly small “a” agile, we must continuously look for ways to escape our fishbowl, to learn, to grow and to change.
Software Process and Measurement 
November 25, 2013 at 11:02 am
Interesting!!
November 25, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Thomas,
I disagree with your depiction of the Kanban community as an orthodoxy and a fishbowl where adherents are abandoning the culture of experimentation. Looking beyond the most visible leader of the Kanban community, one can also find dozens of thought leaders creating and debating divergent ideas. One can also meet “outsiders” presenting at Lean/Kanban conferences and supplying new ideas or questioning core concepts. You have interviewed several such leaders on the SPaMCAST. This is after all a community that doesn’t only talk the evolutionary talk, but has also internalized the evolutionary approach as it creates options and experiments to advance its body of knowledge.
November 25, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Alexei, I must have garbled my point. Community that embrace the culture of experimentation and have not isolated themselves from other ideas, however foreign, are not living in a fishbowl. Overall I think the Kanban currently still currently in an intellectual growth phase therefore in general less likely to be affected by the fishbowl effect. However I am sure both of us know subgroups in the community that are driven by an orthodoxy that is creating a fishbowl effect for themselves and their followers (fishbowls come in many sizes).
I can only hope that your description of a vibrant, exploratory community continues to exist not only in the overall Kanban world but for all frameworks.
November 25, 2013 at 11:49 pm
Thomas, thank you very much for the clarification. Indeed, I’m now watching out with others that we continue this exploration in the Kanban community and hoping someone can watch out for other groups. I’m optimistic, because many in our community (certainly at the expert/leadership level) understand what it takes to evolve successfully. I always encourage people exploring Kanban to connect with the “next” 20-50 leaders and explore their ideas.